Islands of cooperation emerge by stigmergic interactions in iterated spatial games.

This article focuses on the emergence of cooperation in societies of self-interested agents. In particular, it introduces a mechanism based on indirect-stigmergic-interactions between agents moving in an environment, to express the likeliness of finding cooperative partners. On the one hand, agents that find themselves cooperating with others emit pheromones in their current location, expressing the presence of agents willing to cooperate. On the other hand, agents that sense pheromones tend to move towards regions with a higher pheromone concentration. Results show that this mechanism leads to the emergence of spatial regions where cooperation can be effectively sustained, and in which agents can overall get better payoffs than those agents not taking into account pheromones in their choices.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Zambonelli et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)